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Ethereum is very different in this regard than Bitcoin. Ethereum has accounts. So when Ana sends coins to Berta, Berta has no way to leave those coins untouche

Ethereum is very different in this regard than Bitcoin. Ethereum has accounts. So when Ana sends coins to Berta, Berta has no way to leave those coins untouched. As they just raise the amount of coins she owns. So next time Berta sends coins to Charles, it is unclear which coins she sent and if those include Ana's coins. Bitcoin on the other hand has no accounts. When Ana sends coins to Berta, she just marks those coins as "Can be spent by Berta in the future". Berta can decide to never touch them. When Berta sends coins to Charles, she decides which of her coins she sends. It is even more complex, as the conditions how the Bitcoins can be spent are defined by little scripts. Even though those scripts are (for now) more restricted than on Ethereum. So it is not really true that Bitcoins are "on address 17f8..". In reality that means the Bitcoins are locked by a script that demands any transactions must be signed by the secret key that matches public key 17f8... So in a sense, Bitcoin does not have addresses. It has scripts. I wonder how Blockchain explorers deal with more complex scripts. For example on blockchain.com one can look up coins by putting an "address" into the search bar. But how would one look up coins that are not locked by a script that puts the coins under control of a certain key? Or a script that puts them under control of multiple keys?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
heeton 4y ago
Do you have a source for this? Last I checked, the ledger on Bitcoin and Ethereum are functionally identical. A value against a wallet address. There are no "accounts" on either.
- freeAgent 4y ago
  Bitcoin and similar chains use a “UTXO” model that tracks outputs of individual transactions, even when made to the same receiving address. This allows for control of specific coins when spending. ETH doesn’t use UTXO and I don’t believe it has the ability to perform coin control.
- dereg 4y ago
  It's called "coin control". On Ethereum, your entire account balance is inextricably commingled. On Bitcoin, you can maintain the provenance of your coins. https://bitcoin.design/guide/how-it-works/coin-selection/ https://bitcoin.design/guide/how-it-works/coin-selection/
- bsamuels 4y ago
  Many people confuse the account ledger model with "account abstraction". Ethereum has the first, the second is wip.
  - madars 4y ago
    Yep. Though here the confusion seems to be regarding Ethereum accounts and "account balance" interface in many Bitcoin wallets.
- jstanley 4y ago
  How did you check? This has never been true. Bitcoin has always used UTXOs.
- ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago
  This page is somewhat of a source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction Because Bitcoin is more flexible than most people think and offers an ever increasing amount of different transaction types, it is important to read it from top to bottom to get a grasp on it.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Here's an article by Vitalik, explaining the differences between UTXOs and Ethereum's account-based model and why Ethereum did it that way. https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-buterin-2bb782c67e53 https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-bu...
pharmakom 4y ago
True but wallet software might grab them to make a larger spend without the user really thinking about it.
- delaaxe 4y ago
  Then wallet software could just as well be configured not to do so.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    But will it though? Who is going to make the change? Will users update? Etc.
    - delaaxe 4y ago
      It will never be a broad thing, but if a user is worried enough about this they can be careful enough to have plausible deniability, whereas in the Ethereum world it's harder.
    - redox99 4y ago
      Electrum already lets you Freeze coins (it has been able to do this for at least 5 years).
swalsh 4y ago
Bitcoins are NFT's basically
- ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago
  There are differences: Bitcoins can be divided. Ana can take her pile of coins and mark them as "This half can be moved by Berta in the future and the other half can be moved by Charles in the future". Now what was one pile is now two piles. Bitcoins can be combined. To combine two piles of coins into one, one has to be the owner of both piles.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    This is why mixing services work. When you combine and split and recombine and split again, you can theoretically erase provable, one to one links between the inputs and the outputs. Similarly, miner fees are split off in the same way and combined with actual virgin coins in the block reward, but they're technically all the same in the system. You'd need to layer on a tracking on top to "de-fung" the coins. In this way, bitcoin and most other cryptos are drastically more fungible in base reality than cash. Each individual cash note is marked with a serial number, making it literally a non fungible token. The only reason cash is considered fungible is because our laws require the justice system to make believe that they are fungible, not because they actually are. But just because the justice system must consider your cash to be fungible, doesn't mean the base reality of non fungibility can't be easily used. e.g. banks could implement a system to scan each incoming and outgoing serial number on every note they touch, linking them to associated accounts. Even though they can't know how the notes are spread around in meatspace, you can collect a lot of the nodes and do a pretty good job filling in the blanks of how cash moves.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Treating dollars as non-fungible because you might be interested in a particular serial number (and there are people who do this) is equivalent to various "colored coins" schemes on the Bitcoin blockchain, where you treat Bitcoin that's passed through certain wallets as being non-fungible with other Bitcoin. I would not call either of these more or less fungible, because the majority of people who use dollars or Bitcoins don't care about the fungibility beyond maybe "is this stolen property".
60secs 4y ago
Fix would be for OFAC to issue guidance for list of burn addresses to send TC dust funds to. It's not hard to perform double entry accounting on triple entry accounting systems like ETH. There are very good reasons why ETH uses accounting vs UTXO and scalability is at the front of those reasons.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  What do you mean by triple entry accounting systems like ETH? Do you have any references?
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Still sucks that unwitting people would have to (1) know this is going on and (2) go through the trouble of paying fees to burn the dust / figure out how much they need to burn. And sure that could work once or twice but if this becomes a regular thing it's most certainly not sustainable.
  - romeoblade 4y ago
    With being in the IT field for 25 years, I was still on the fence about cryptocurrency. I wasn't for it or against it because it didn't affect me. I understand the arguments for it and against it, along with the privacy aspect of it. However actions like this push me towards being against it.
    - asah 4y ago
      meh this whole thing is stupid - law enforcement proxies (chainalysis) can trivially ignore the dust in tracking down who's using Tornado to launder material amounts of wealth.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Exactly. Every law enforcement agency has prosecutorial discretion. They can easily ignore this and still go after the bad guys they want to target.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Does typical Bitcoin software expose this to the user so that they can control which coins are moving?
- willmorrison 4y ago
  Users can specify what inputs they are sending in a transaction with lower-level software like the Bitcoin RPC, but a typical wallet does not expose that functionality.
  - flotzam 4y ago
    It's exposed in Electrum and the Bitcoin Core GUI wallet. Perfect for donations, you can spend one UTXO without change.
    - kragen 4y ago
      Where is the option in these UIs? I currently use Electrum mostly but may switch back to Bitcoin Core.
      - redox99 4y ago
        Coins tab, right click on the coin, spend.
      - flotzam 4y ago
        Electrum: View > Show Coins (adds a new Coins tab) Bitcoin Core: Settings > Options... > Wallet > Enable coin control features (adds it on the Send tab)
        kragen 4y ago
        Thank you!
- aftbit 4y ago
  Some does, some does not. I have heard this feature called "Coin Control". Ledger and Electrum have it at least.
panarky 4y ago
Ethereum has addresses just like Bitcoin has addresses. You can choose to use a different address for every transaction (more private, less convenient), or you can choose to use the same address for every transaction (less private, more convenient). A lot of the client software in the Ethereum ecosystem chooses the latter, less private and more convenient, to simulate an "account". But that's a choice, not a requirement, since they're all just addresses.
- eis 4y ago
  OP's point is that in Bitcoin there are coins (unspent transaction outputs) that are associated with an address but the receiver can leave them untouched. He can continue and ignore the tained coins from Tornado. In Ethereum you don't have coins that get associated with an address, the balance of that address increases so in a way that mixes the "coins" with the rest of the "coins" for that address and so the receiver can't put them aside. Put another way: in Bitcoin you can refuse accepting coins by ignoring them. In Ethereum you can't refuse the funds that someone sends you. So now that you have funds from a sanctioned entity in your wallet what do you do? One solution would be to send an equal amount to a burn address to show that you never wanted these but it has two problems: it requires one to actively monitor the wallet and know what incoming funds are from some sanctioned entity AND requires you to spend money on a transaction you never wanted to do in the first place. And what if it's a cold wallet. It's a really messy situation.
  - ses1984 4y ago
    What’s the difference between ignoring bitcoin sent to you vs never letting the balance in an ethereum address get below coins you refuse? Also if you wanted couldn’t you create a transaction that burns an amount equal to the tainted coins, that includes a message stating your intention? This seems like a non issue to me.
    - eis 4y ago
      If the US Gov comes to you and asks you why you received funds from a sanctioned entity it's not enough to claim "But I intend to never use them, I will never let the balance in this address run lower than this amount". You'd have to take some action to actively distance yourself from these funds. You could do a transaction but I described the problem with that in the previous comment (edited before I saw your edit)
deleted 4y ago
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ivoras 4y ago
> I wonder how Blockchain explorers deal with more complex scripts. For example on blockchain.com one can look up coins by putting an "address" into the search bar. But how would one look up coins that are not locked by a script that puts the coins under control of a certain key? Or a script that puts them under control of multiple keys? I used to build blockchain explorers, and the answer is "they usually don't deal with it." Depending on how much resources the operator can devote to it, of couse. Some of the information simply cannot be pulled out because of cryptography, some require graph-like processing. Ethereum was/is a dream to work with compared to UTXO.
- nemo1618 4y ago
  Nitpick: A UTXO-based model does not imply the use of unlock scripts. You can have a UTXO blockchain where the only form of address is a simple pubkey hash, for example.
leijurv 4y ago
> I wonder how Blockchain explorers deal with more complex scripts. For example on blockchain.com one can look up coins by putting an "address" into the search bar. But how would one look up coins that are not locked by a script that puts the coins under control of a certain key? Or a script that puts them under control of multiple keys? The reveal of the script is actually time-delayed. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pay_to_script_hash https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pay_to_script_hash Essentially, you "send" the Bitcoin to the hash of the script, then whenever a transaction spends those coins it must reveal the script (whose hash must match), as well as some data (normally a digital signature or two) that fulfills the script's conditions. So, the block explorer doesn't get to deal with it until the coins are spent, up until that point all it knows is a hash, which is represented as beginning with a "3", to differentiate it from the simple single-key addresses that begin with a "1". When it's spent, a block explorer could show the revealed script contents if it wanted.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

heeton 4y ago

Do you have a source for this? Last I checked, the ledger on Bitcoin and Ethereum are functionally identical. A value against a wallet address. There are no "accounts" on either.

freeAgent 4y ago
Bitcoin and similar chains use a “UTXO” model that tracks outputs of individual transactions, even when made to the same receiving address. This allows for control of specific coins when spending. ETH doesn’t use UTXO and I don’t believe it has the ability to perform coin control.
dereg 4y ago
It's called "coin control". On Ethereum, your entire account balance is inextricably commingled. On Bitcoin, you can maintain the provenance of your coins. https://bitcoin.design/guide/how-it-works/coin-selection/ https://bitcoin.design/guide/how-it-works/coin-selection/
bsamuels 4y ago
Many people confuse the account ledger model with "account abstraction". Ethereum has the first, the second is wip.
- madars 4y ago
  Yep. Though here the confusion seems to be regarding Ethereum accounts and "account balance" interface in many Bitcoin wallets.
jstanley 4y ago
How did you check? This has never been true. Bitcoin has always used UTXOs.
ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago
This page is somewhat of a source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction Because Bitcoin is more flexible than most people think and offers an ever increasing amount of different transaction types, it is important to read it from top to bottom to get a grasp on it.
DennisP 4y ago
Here's an article by Vitalik, explaining the differences between UTXOs and Ethereum's account-based model and why Ethereum did it that way. https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-buterin-2bb782c67e53 https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-bu...

pharmakom 4y ago

True but wallet software might grab them to make a larger spend without the user really thinking about it.

delaaxe 4y ago
Then wallet software could just as well be configured not to do so.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  But will it though? Who is going to make the change? Will users update? Etc.
  - delaaxe 4y ago
    It will never be a broad thing, but if a user is worried enough about this they can be careful enough to have plausible deniability, whereas in the Ethereum world it's harder.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Electrum already lets you Freeze coins (it has been able to do this for at least 5 years).

swalsh 4y ago

Bitcoins are NFT's basically

ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago
There are differences: Bitcoins can be divided. Ana can take her pile of coins and mark them as "This half can be moved by Berta in the future and the other half can be moved by Charles in the future". Now what was one pile is now two piles. Bitcoins can be combined. To combine two piles of coins into one, one has to be the owner of both piles.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  This is why mixing services work. When you combine and split and recombine and split again, you can theoretically erase provable, one to one links between the inputs and the outputs. Similarly, miner fees are split off in the same way and combined with actual virgin coins in the block reward, but they're technically all the same in the system. You'd need to layer on a tracking on top to "de-fung" the coins. In this way, bitcoin and most other cryptos are drastically more fungible in base reality than cash. Each individual cash note is marked with a serial number, making it literally a non fungible token. The only reason cash is considered fungible is because our laws require the justice system to make believe that they are fungible, not because they actually are. But just because the justice system must consider your cash to be fungible, doesn't mean the base reality of non fungibility can't be easily used. e.g. banks could implement a system to scan each incoming and outgoing serial number on every note they touch, linking them to associated accounts. Even though they can't know how the notes are spread around in meatspace, you can collect a lot of the nodes and do a pretty good job filling in the blanks of how cash moves.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Treating dollars as non-fungible because you might be interested in a particular serial number (and there are people who do this) is equivalent to various "colored coins" schemes on the Bitcoin blockchain, where you treat Bitcoin that's passed through certain wallets as being non-fungible with other Bitcoin. I would not call either of these more or less fungible, because the majority of people who use dollars or Bitcoins don't care about the fungibility beyond maybe "is this stolen property".

60secs 4y ago

Fix would be for OFAC to issue guidance for list of burn addresses to send TC dust funds to. It's not hard to perform double entry accounting on triple entry accounting systems like ETH. There are very good reasons why ETH uses accounting vs UTXO and scalability is at the front of those reasons.

SnowHill9902 4y ago
What do you mean by triple entry accounting systems like ETH? Do you have any references?
blurbleblurble 4y ago
Still sucks that unwitting people would have to (1) know this is going on and (2) go through the trouble of paying fees to burn the dust / figure out how much they need to burn. And sure that could work once or twice but if this becomes a regular thing it's most certainly not sustainable.
- romeoblade 4y ago
  With being in the IT field for 25 years, I was still on the fence about cryptocurrency. I wasn't for it or against it because it didn't affect me. I understand the arguments for it and against it, along with the privacy aspect of it. However actions like this push me towards being against it.
  - asah 4y ago
    meh this whole thing is stupid - law enforcement proxies (chainalysis) can trivially ignore the dust in tracking down who's using Tornado to launder material amounts of wealth.
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      Exactly. Every law enforcement agency has prosecutorial discretion. They can easily ignore this and still go after the bad guys they want to target.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

Does typical Bitcoin software expose this to the user so that they can control which coins are moving?

willmorrison 4y ago
Users can specify what inputs they are sending in a transaction with lower-level software like the Bitcoin RPC, but a typical wallet does not expose that functionality.
- flotzam 4y ago
  It's exposed in Electrum and the Bitcoin Core GUI wallet. Perfect for donations, you can spend one UTXO without change.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Where is the option in these UIs? I currently use Electrum mostly but may switch back to Bitcoin Core.
    - redox99 4y ago
      Coins tab, right click on the coin, spend.
    - flotzam 4y ago
      Electrum: View > Show Coins (adds a new Coins tab) Bitcoin Core: Settings > Options... > Wallet > Enable coin control features (adds it on the Send tab)
      - kragen 4y ago
        Thank you!
aftbit 4y ago
Some does, some does not. I have heard this feature called "Coin Control". Ledger and Electrum have it at least.

panarky 4y ago

Ethereum has addresses just like Bitcoin has addresses. You can choose to use a different address for every transaction (more private, less convenient), or you can choose to use the same address for every transaction (less private, more convenient). A lot of the client software in the Ethereum ecosystem chooses the latter, less private and more convenient, to simulate an "account". But that's a choice, not a requirement, since they're all just addresses.

eis 4y ago
OP's point is that in Bitcoin there are coins (unspent transaction outputs) that are associated with an address but the receiver can leave them untouched. He can continue and ignore the tained coins from Tornado. In Ethereum you don't have coins that get associated with an address, the balance of that address increases so in a way that mixes the "coins" with the rest of the "coins" for that address and so the receiver can't put them aside. Put another way: in Bitcoin you can refuse accepting coins by ignoring them. In Ethereum you can't refuse the funds that someone sends you. So now that you have funds from a sanctioned entity in your wallet what do you do? One solution would be to send an equal amount to a burn address to show that you never wanted these but it has two problems: it requires one to actively monitor the wallet and know what incoming funds are from some sanctioned entity AND requires you to spend money on a transaction you never wanted to do in the first place. And what if it's a cold wallet. It's a really messy situation.
- ses1984 4y ago
  What’s the difference between ignoring bitcoin sent to you vs never letting the balance in an ethereum address get below coins you refuse? Also if you wanted couldn’t you create a transaction that burns an amount equal to the tainted coins, that includes a message stating your intention? This seems like a non issue to me.
  - eis 4y ago
    If the US Gov comes to you and asks you why you received funds from a sanctioned entity it's not enough to claim "But I intend to never use them, I will never let the balance in this address run lower than this amount". You'd have to take some action to actively distance yourself from these funds. You could do a transaction but I described the problem with that in the previous comment (edited before I saw your edit)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ivoras 4y ago

nemo1618 4y ago
Nitpick: A UTXO-based model does not imply the use of unlock scripts. You can have a UTXO blockchain where the only form of address is a simple pubkey hash, for example.

leijurv 4y ago

> I wonder how Blockchain explorers deal with more complex scripts. For example on blockchain.com one can look up coins by putting an "address" into the search bar. But how would one look up coins that are not locked by a script that puts the coins under control of a certain key? Or a script that puts them under control of multiple keys? The reveal of the script is actually time-delayed. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pay_to_script_hash https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pay_to_script_hash Essentially, you "send" the Bitcoin to the hash of the script, then whenever a transaction spends those coins it must reveal the script (whose hash must match), as well as some data (normally a digital signature or two) that fulfills the script's conditions. So, the block explorer doesn't get to deal with it until the coins are spent, up until that point all it knows is a hash, which is represented as beginning with a "3", to differentiate it from the simple single-key addresses that begin with a "1". When it's spent, a block explorer could show the revealed script contents if it wanted.